Pushing & Pulling Music Discovery: Which Are You Focused On?
There is quite an interesting discussion over at the Music Think Tank that everybody in the music biz needs to give a read, perhaps even twice: 2009 – The Pull Music Paradigm Shift Emerges.
In the article, Bruce Warila discusses the Push VS Pull mentality that is currently at odds with each other in the war over the traditional music business and the new digital realm of music discovery.
Here’s a bit of a breakdown over some of the underlying principles that Bruce is talking about:
The “Push” mentality – in the old days of music promotion, labels and promoters had to, for the most part, push music on the masses, using all different types of promotion: radio, print advertising, television appearances, and giving the proverbial handjob to those in the business that could reach those who would review their record and get the word out about an act.
Sure, there were plenty of acts that thrived on word-of-mouth through touring and having a dedicated fan base, but for the most part most major acts obtained their fandom through this “push” system.
Now, we have the “Pull” mentality – hundreds of different social and search applications that allow the end user the ability to sift through millions of songs and find the ones that they are interested in using all kinds of different factors – recommendations based on bands the user currently listens to (think the iTunes Genius, Last.fm, Pandora, etc), recommendations based on music style, song structure, and the list goes on and on.
The difference is one method is others “pushing” music to you – hyping and act and getting it in front of your face on numerous fronts in order to get you to listen.
And the other requires no work in the promotion department (other than of course making sure your music is accessible to the hundreds of music applications people are using) – letting the users “pull” the music that they are into out of all music that exists.
The end result is the user does the promotion for you through various online social activity – tagging songs with keywords, blogging about new music to whatever audience is listening, and sharing songs with their social networks; posting to Facebook, adding songs to their MySpace profile, dedicating music through iLike, rating music in iTunes, etc.
Now, I’m not completely sold that music promotion in itself will ever come to an end – but I do agree the methods used in the past might not get as much of a budget as they used to.
The key here to to make sure that your tunes are available to those who are consuming it through these various “pull” technologies, so that the listeners who are looking for your particular sound and style can find it on their own and ultimately, if it’s good enough, share it with others; which, at the end of the day, is the best form of promotion you’re ever going to receive.
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